Stupid Question Territory (Part 2)

Photo by Ravi Singh on Unsplash

By Erin Deborah Waks

NB: No men were harmed in research for this article. Those questioned and quoted below will remain anonymous for their own protection, but include my male friends, siblings, boyfriend and those of my other close female friends. An admittedly small sample size.

‘Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses, or one horse-sized duck?’ one of my best friends asked me last month. I stared in disbelief. The intellectual debate at the dinner table in my apartment had finally reached this point.

I wrote, last week, about Stupid Question Territory, the point at which girls ramble off a load of bizarre questions in anxious anticipation of asking one proper one. What I got wrong, though, was that Stupid Question Territory, or SQT, is not an unfamiliar concept to men. It’s just completely different.

Stupid Question Territory (abbr. SQT) 

[proper noun, masc] 

1 A so-called ‘zone of comfort’, usually reserved for, but not exclusively maintained by, those with the status of ‘boyfriend’ or ‘male romantic partner’, into which one forays once one has crossed into feelings of comfort with one’s partner. 

2 A momentary accumulation of seemingly banal questions in attempt to reveal the absolute nonsense occupying one’s thoughts. 

Examples: What do you think is the maximum number of chicken nuggets I could eat? Would I get drunk if I inserted a vodka-soaked tampon up my bum? Who would win in a fight between lions and graters? How many lions would you have to throw at the sun to make it explode? If I travelled back 200 years with a fully charged iPhone, how long would it take to take over the world?

I don’t like to generalise, and I wouldn’t write that all men and women fall into entirely separate categories, but from my (admittedly limited) research, it does seem as follows: women enter the SQT when apprehensive about asking a vulnerable question to a new partner, but men enter it once they’ve become comfortable with said partner and start to ask all the weird and wonderful things on their minds.

It’s kind of cute, when you think about it. So many of my girlfriends think about what’s on the men in their lives’ minds - are they thinking about other women? How do they feel about me? Do my guy friends care about me as much as my female friends do? What does it mean if they’re not saying anything? In reality, or at least in my experience of it, their thoughts are just as occupied as ours, just with entirely different subject matter. And only when they get close and comfortable enough with someone do they care to reveal this remarkable, random, strange and hilarious inner world with them. Like I said, kind of cute. 

Either way, at least now I know, from my expert sources, that I’d be sensible to take on 100 mini horses rather than one gigantic duck. And the techniques to use were that situation to ever arise. Thank God for that.